Wordless Wednesday: Crispy around the edges

Thank goodness for Wordless Wednesdays, because frankly I am deep fried right now.

Losing Blanche; funeral; sitting shivah; the wonderful but exhausting annual Halloween Party at our friend's Kingston house, driving the 4 hour round trip to the Halloween Party; Jacob's continuing ridiculous bussing saga; New York Comic Con WITHOUT Daddy this year; sleepless night to finish my Hopeful Parents post; ANOTHER 3-day weekend full of sibling animosity... I am just scooped out again, like I was this past spring when my father passed away.

So instead of my usual, labored-over writing, I offer up here a few illustrative pictures from the past two weeks:

From the awesomest Halloween Party (a thousand "thank yous" Meilan & Billy):

 Um, let's be clear on this: Ethan DREW the design in black marker. Mom (that would be me) was the one with the pumpkin gut hands.

Boo!

I think my favorite part of this day was deep into the evening, when it had gotten dark and the kids were running around outside, barely supervised. They had been together all afternoon and had formed a cohesive kid gang; were playing games whose rules they could not explain to us even if they tried. This is a freedom that city kids don't ever get: to be outside at night in the true dark without a bossy parent standing right over you. I love being able to give my kids the magic of the inky night, even if just a few times a year.


From NYC Comic Con:

Beyblade forever!

Happily obsessed

Ethan found this booth with the soon to be released Beyblade Metal Fusion video game for both Wii and DS. Lucky for us, we own both platforms (Oy!)  He LOVED playing the game, had to be torn away from the booth kicking & screaming. Can you say "top of the Hannukah list"?

It was so sad to be there without my husband who is a comics professional and was actually a consultant for the Con. He had put together many of the wonderful panels, was supposed to be on or moderating many of them. A highlight of going to the Con has always been visiting Dad at his booth, walking around with him and being the proud son of. We felt his absence keenly this year.  I wanted to bring the boys anyway, was glad I did, but wow, was it crowded.


Finally, this is why I love coming to pick Jacob up from his new school a few days a week (the bus ride home is ridiculously long.)  How much I will love doing it in freezing snowy January is questionable. But for now:

I wish you all a happier Wednesday than I'm having. I have a stupid cold and am going to crawl back into bed now & pull the covers up over my head. Until I have to leave to go pick up Jacob.


I’m linking up to Wordless Wednesday at Angry Julie Monday.

Blanche, Age 93

On Monday, with her sons at her side, though by now far from knowing this, my mother-in-law, Blanche, slowed her breathing down, slowed it again, and then, she finished. Her chest stilled, no longer struggling to catch just one more breath. She slipped away gently, connected to people she loved, much the way she had lived her life.

I was not at her side, having left the hospital an hour earlier to take my own elderly mother to a doctor’s appointment. Before I left, I said my goodbyes, gingerly stroked my mother-in-law’s soft hair, because I knew it was going to happen in the hour I would be gone.

And sure enough, as I was helping my mother on with her coat at the conclusion of her quick, uneventful check-up (“you’re great for 88, Mrs. Steinhardt”) my cell phone rang.

“This is it,” I told my mother, as there was not one shred of doubt what would be said when I answered.

“She’s gone” my husband choked out the words. “It was peaceful, she just… stopped.”

We knew this was coming, her body clearly worn out after a long, full, fulfilling lifetime, but still, it’s never easy. My husband loved her very much, will miss her greatly.

She had rallied last week for a few final conversations: a meaningful one with my husband that he will always cherish; an evening with grandchildren, marveling at a belly full of her twin great-grandsons-to-be.

We are saddened maybe most that she will never get to meet them out in the world. But it is also good that this circle of life will tumble on. She will so clearly live on in the memories of those whose lives she blessed with her presence, and through her genes, now dispersing themselves on though yet a next generation.

My husband’s family is large, and Blanche much beloved within it. There will be tears and hugs aplenty in the next few days.

Tomorrow, a funeral, and then within a few weeks: a birth, a double bris, a continuation of family, which meant the world to Blanche, my mother-in-law.

A Funeral in Our Future

I let Ethan stay up very late tonight.  He was anxious and keyed up (we all are) and putting him to bed when he's in that kind of wound-up state is always quite the challenge.  This is an understatement on the order of calling the Atlantic Ocean a rather large pond.  Yet another gift of ADD.

I just wasn’t up for the fight of it.  So I let him play and read and watch TV until his eyelids got droopy and his body got floppy and I carried him to bed and let him skip brushing his teeth “just this once.”  And still, he needed to talk once he’d settled into his nest of blankets.

“I don’t like funerals” he said “why does there have to be a funeral?” 

“Nobody likes funerals, honey, but it’s what we do, it’s part of saying goodbye to the people we loved.”

Just then his father came home from the hospital, poked his head into the boys’ room to gaze at the sons he has barely seen these past weeks of caring for his ailing, failing mother.  Hearing Ethan still awake, he leaned in for a goodnight kiss. “Family hug!” Ethan requested and we squeezed ourselves together around him. 

“I miss you”

“I miss you, too, Daddy”

“We’ll spend some time together soon, I promise. After…”

And his sentence trails off.  We know what the after is, no need to say it yet again. 

“I am very sad” Ethan tells me in between yawns. “Tears jumped out of my eyes when Daddy hugged me.”  Unbidden, cartoon images of little teardrops with black spindly legs jumping around Ethan’s head made me smile.

“We’re all sad right now, honey, this is a sad time. But we'll be sad together, help each other through this.” were the last words he heard tonight as his breathing grew simultaneously soft and louder, his hand holding mine slowly released its grip towards slumber.

I tiptoed out of the room as the dancing teardrops on Ethan’s pillow waved their cartoony arms goodbye, promising to keep watch over my sleeping son.

Sitting Here in Limbo

My husband is a very private man. I am not. His 93 year old mother went into the hospital a week ago Monday and she is gravely ill.  As my father passed away just this past March, at a similar advanced age, of a very similar condition, after spending much time at the same hospital, seeing some of the same doctors, you can see I might be having a lot of feelings right now.

I wrote about this yesterday, here.

My feelings are mine, but the situation at hand is my husband's.  And I am trying to walk that fine line between respecting his privacy, honoring his need to own the story of his mother, while still finding a way to talk about what I am going through right now.  Which is completely tangled up in the story of my husband and his mother.  His story. 

So there is much I cannot say.  But I will say this: there is nothing easy about this time.

We wait.  A lot.

For doctors.  For nurses.  For phone calls.

And there is so much that needs attending to in our lives.  We carry bags and briefcases full of important-stuff-that-must-be-done.  And they sit unopened.   Waiting time cannot be filled.

It feels empty, but it is not empty.  It is full.  Of waiting.

The mind jumps around, cannot concentrate for long; it alights on memory's branches, leaps off again.  We flit between past, present, and future, settling nowhere.  We stare into space.

When there is so much feeling, sometimes there is its absence, too. The lid so tightly clamped onto the kettle, furious boiling contained.  For now.

I hold my husband's hand.  I hug him tight.  I want him to know he is not alone in this.  But of course he is, too.

I think a lot about my father, and remember again how it felt to watch him slip away, how there was that point when he was really no longer my father.  At all.  But then there would be a moment, and I would hold onto that one, a firefly cupped in my hands, winking its delicate yellow glowy spark into the darkness, until the next.

There kept being moments.

Until there weren't.

We wait.

Flowers of Late Summer

It is the end of vacation, the end of summer, the end of August.  I am soaking up the colors of western Massachusetts, knowing that tomorrow I trade them back for New York City's glorious grays.

Old mountains, these Berkshires, soft, worn, folded, green, misted, rolling hills. A lazy dragonfly buzzing the pool, flashing iridescence. A sky so blue it begs for clouds. And the flowers, the lovely flowers enjoying their last sun baked glory, kisses of violet, gold, delicate pink sprinkled throughout the green.

I have always loved flowers.  I get this from my mother, who loves flowers and has taught me their many names.  We would walk the fields on vacations reveling in wildflowers exuberant abandon.  Even as my father was dying, a spectacular blossom would give her tears pause, lift up her spirits, move her with its ephemeral beauty.

There is bittersweetness here: the days shortening, the nights crisping up, even the heat bearable as we prepare to say goodbye to summer. 

And there is another goodbye shadowing our lives, looming over us as we swim and play: my mother-in-law is fading fast as the last blooms of summer.  

We have spent most of this vacation without my husband, as he was summoned back to the city to care for his mother through a hospitalization. Even back with us for a few days, he is tethered to the phone, trying to make sense of a constant stream of updates: blood oxygen levels, milkshakes consumed, waking verses sleeping states.

We rely on signs and portents to try to keep her ever more delicate health in equilibrium, but the scales are tipping and there is only so much to be done. 

Tomorrow we will jump in a lake, lap the pool a few times, and pack our bags (making sure the precious blue bear is safely tucked away.) We will eat one last meal at the much beloved, wonderfully kid friendly yet sophisticated Route 7 Grill, and return to the city to take back up the reins of our lives.

The children and I to prepare for the coming school year, my husband to prepare for what cannot be prepared for, the coming end of his mother's long life. 

Having just walked that path with my father this winter, my heart aches for him.

Tomorrow I will walk the garden, wander my mind one more time among the blossoms, carry with me these images soundtracked with the boys splashing laughter "one, two, three, cannonball!"

And hope to make it last through the coming winter, through the coming storms.